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The first lesson of history is that evil is good.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Ralph Waldo Emerson
Age: 78 †
Born: 1803
Born: May 25
Died: 1882
Died: April 27
Biographer
Diarist
Essayist
Philosopher
Poet
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Boston
Massachusetts
R. W. Emerson
Waldo Emerson
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Good
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Lessons
Evil
History
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More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson
People who know how to act are never preachers.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
This immediate dependence of language upon nature, this conversion of an outward phenomenon into a type of somewhat in human life,never loses its power to affect us. It is this which gives that piquancy to the conversation of a strong-natured farmer or backwoodsman, which all men relish.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Men admire the man who can organize their wishes and thoughts in stone and wood and steel and brass.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
One thing is forever good That one thing is Success.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The world is upheld by the veracity of good men: they make the earth wholesome.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The stars awaken a certain reverence, because though always present, they are inaccessible but all natural objects make a kindred impression, when the mind is open to their influence. Nature never wears a mean appearance.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Good writing is a kind of skating which carries off the performer where he would not go.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Imagination is a very high sort of seeing.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nature is a language and every new fact one learns is a new word but it is not a language taken to pieces and dead in the dictionary, but the language put together into a most significant and universal sense. I wish to learn this language - not that I may know a new grammar, but that I may read the great book which is written in that tongue.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
All men are poets at heart. They serve nature for bread, but her loveliness overcomes them sometimes.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
No man has ever had a point of pride that was not injurious to him.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The reverence for the deeds of our ancestors is a treacherous sentiment. Their merit was not to reverence the old, but to honor the present moment and we falsely make them excuses of the very habit which they hated and defied.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Society is a masked ball, where every one hides his real character, and reveals it by hiding.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Let us unlearn our wisdom of the world. Let us lie low in the Lord's power, and learn that truth alone makes rich and great.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
You send your child to the schoolmaster, but 'tis the schoolboys who educate him. You send him to the Latin class, but much of histuition comes, on his way to school, from the shop- windows.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I am old, yet I look at wise men and see that I am very young. I look over those stars yonder, and into the myriads of the aspirant and ordered souls, and see I am a stranger and a youth and have yet my spurs to win. Too ridiculous are these airs of age.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Do not you see that every misfortune is misconduct that every honour is desert that every effort is an insolence of your own?...You carry your fortune in your own hand.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I should as soon think of swimming across Charles River, when I wish to go to Boston, as of reading all my books in originals, when I have them rendered for me in my mother tongue.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
What we do not call education is more precious than that which we call so. We form no guess, at the time of receiving a thought, of its comparative value. And education often wastes its effort in attempts to thwart and balk this natural magnetism, which is sure to select what belongs to it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A great man is always willing to be little.
Ralph Waldo Emerson